[theme-reviewers] A Question About Theme Review/Submission

[Otto]

On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 5:24 PM, Ryan Frankel <ryan.frankel at gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree.  We had an internal debate on which way to go with this and it was decided that since we were including styling it would be a theme.  What we saw with a lot of plugins is that while they give you the functionality you still have to do all the styling yourself (see any calendar plugin).  We wanted to create something that required absolutely no end-user interaction or coding so the theme was born.
>
> It is even more of a grey area then I realized though.

I would consider separating theme from functionality here. Sure, a
theme can do anything a plugin can, but limiting themes to a stylistic
model, where only functionality that affects the display of things is
included, makes the most sense. While I get that's it's hard to
separate the two in this case, perhaps making a sort of generic
"ticket" plugin and generalizing the concept might be useful.

No reason you can't make both a theme and a plugin which work
together. This also gives you the side benefit of being able to create
many different themes for the same basic ticket system.


-Otto